Kozyrev Details the Open Road at Hurtling Speed

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and educated in Athens, Ohio, and Santa Barbara (where he now lives), Dimitri Kozyrev is an artist whose first solo show in Los Angeles consists of a series of great American road paintings. Although road movies are a staple of the film industry, road paintings are an art history anomaly, probably because images of highways and back roads are ordinarily thought of as landscapes.

At Cirrus Gallery, Kozyrev’s mid- to large-size paintings avoid this designation because they faithfully re-create the experience of hurtling through the landscape in a vehicle powerful enough to make the legal speed limit seem like an unjust restriction of personal liberty. To stand before one of his canvases is to feel the tug of the open road, a sensation of expansiveness that makes you breathe deeply when you break out of traffic, leaving the congested city streets to shrink in your rearview mirror.

Kozyrev engineers this effect by painting, with the precision of a miniaturist, extremely detailed images of trees, telephone poles, billboards and street lights on the horizon lines at the centers of otherwise fairly empty canvases.

Like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, however, these places are elusive. As you move in for a close-up, they stop obeying the laws of one-point perspective. What had seemed to be a coherent image disintegrates into an array of disjointed planes, disconnected lines, illegible gestures and random dollops of color and texture.

As a painter, Kozyrev is a master of hit-and-run illusionism. His ever-receding cities are Cubist collisions filtered through Adam Ross’ futuristic paintings of virtual worlds. Rather than depict the roadside in all its gritty materiality, Kozyrev gives physical form to the psychological state triggered by driving, whether along the interstate or on any old county trunk.

There’s something profoundly optimistic about getting out of town and heading off on an adventure, especially one without a specific destination in mind. That’s precisely where Kozyrev’s art takes viewers: both deeper into your own thoughts and farther out into the world.

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Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda St., L.A., (213) 680-3473, through March 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.